Doing a Kant (was Re: Rhetorical Gestures)

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Wed Oct 20 06:53:19 PDT 1999



>Those who criticise Kant (or Jefferson) for failing to live up to the
>principles of equality that they enunciated do not understand that their
>criticisms are wholly parasitic upon those very principles.

You lost me there so far as Jefferson is concerned, Jim. The Lord of Monticello got a good working over here on the list a year ago, when I proposed that the Jefferson Memorial be bulldozed as an utterly ill-conceived monument to one of the greatest hypocrites of history. I was accused at that time of being a 20th century provincial -- or words to that effect -- for imposing contemporary views of racial relations on the 18th century. I do not accept that criticism. Jefferson's own troubled reflections about the vengeance that a "just God" could visit on slaveholder (I can't recall his exact words) surely suggests that, at some level, Jefferson himself realized he was full of it.

Carl

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